QUESTIONS NOBODY IS ASKING: Nate Silver: What is Blueskyism?
Why this failure to achieve escape velocity? Well, as I’ve written about before, it might be Twitter itself was the outlier, created by tech nerds and for tech nerds at a time when the Internet was less tribal. Not only is anything else unlikely to supplant Twitter, but Twitter itself would probably fail to realize the same prominence if it were launched today, even if there were no dominant Twitter-like platform competing with it.
Founder effects are powerful in predicting network growth: if you go to a new club and everyone there has very peculiar tastes, it’s unlikely to become the hot new thing in town. Especially if everyone there is annoying and doesn’t seem to want you at their party in the first place.
Bluesky was initially popular with Twitter refugees who disliked Musk’s takeover of the platform, some of whom proclaimed that Elon had unleashed the “gates of hell” by restoring banned accounts or predicted that the platform would implode due to a shortage of engineering talent. I suppose I have no problem with this; ironically, the first post in Silver Bulletin history is entitled “In case Twitter goes to zero”. (I wanted a hedge in case it did, although if we’re being honest, I also had one eye out the door as ABC News was beginning to dismantle FiveThirtyEight.3) However, this also self-selected for a certain type of user, adherents of an attitude that I call “Blueskyism”.
Blueskyism should not be mistaken for general left-of-center political views. Google search traffic for Bluesky over the past year is highly correlated with Kamala Harris’s vote share, but has some other skews: controlling for the Harris vote, it’s (statistically) significantly higher in states with a large white population and where the percentage of people with advanced degrees is higher. Bluesky is disproportionately popular in D.C., but also in crunchy white states like Vermont and Oregon. Search traffic for Twitter/X over the same period shows the same bias toward highly educated states, but less toward Harris voters4 and actually an inverse correlation with the white population share. (X gets more search traffic in more diverse states.)
After quoting several paragraphs on Bluesky from “economist and former Bloomberg Opinion columnist Noah Smith” on Wednesday, Jim Geraghty concluded:
Rush Limbaugh used to joke that after the final victory of conservatism, the right should keep some liberals around to ensure no one forgot what they believed and how harmful their ideas were. “So you will never forget what these people were like . . . keep one Marxist and two liberals on the staff of every university so you can show your children . . . living fossils. Living fossils.”
If the goal is to keep progressives walled off from the rest of society, minimally influential among those who don’t already agree with them, and arguing amongst themselves about who’s the purest, Bluesky is a masterpiece.
Progressives, including advocates for athletes born male participating in women’s sports, could attempt to convince the broader public, if they wanted to, but they would have to engage with those who disagree with respect, and attempt to persuade, not shame, demonize, mock, or sneer. And even before the question of whether they could do that . . . how many progressives actually want to do that?
Flashback: Glenn on “Our caveman politics.”